Controversy persists over the ethics of compensating research participants and providing posttrial benefits to communities in developing countries. Little is known about residents' views on these subjects. In this study, interviews about compensation and posttrial benefits from a hypothetical HIV vaccine trial were conducted in Uganda’s Rakai District. Most respondents said researchers owed the community posttrial benefits and research compensation, but opinions differed as to what these should be. Debates about posttrial benefits and compensation rarely include residents' views like these, (...) but future ones should. (shrink)

Mealey's sociopathy model is an exemplar of popular diathesis-stress models. Although such models, when presented in descriptive language, offer the illusion of integrative explanation, their actual scientific value is very limited because they fail to make specific, quantitative, falsifiable predictions. Conceptual and quantitative weaknesses of such diathesis-stress models are discussed and the requirements for useful models are outlined.

Last summer, I was thinking about a public service project for my disability discrimination law course. I teach the course in fall, and try to incorporate a project each year. Integrating a public service project into a traditional doctrinal course fits within the trend toward expanding teaching techniques beyond the case method in order to better prepare students for the practice of law. It was also inspired in part by the Carnegie Foundation's 2007 report, “Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession (...) of Law,” as a way to foster “civic professionalism,” and to “[link] the interests of legal educators with the needs of legal practitioners and with the public the profession is pledged to serve.” That link is especially important to disability discrimination law, as issues critical to the lives of people with disabilities often go unnoticed and unaddressed by people without disabilities. (shrink)

Abstract:Despite a growing body of advocacy for the beneficial effects of music education upon individuals’ development and wellbeing, lived experiences in the music classroom are testament to a diversity of both positive and negative musical encounters. For some pupils, classroom music-making is characterized by opportunities, achievements, and friendships. But for others it is redolent of shortcomings, disappointments, and conflicts. This reveals an urgent need for researchers and practitioners to acknowledge pupils’ “musical vulnerability”: their inherent and situational openness to being affected (...) by the semantic and somatic properties of music. In this essay, I offer a detailed conceptualization of musical vulnerability and its place in music education. I outline Judith Butler’s seminal theory of linguistic vulnerability and evaluate how her conviction that language can cause hurt and harm may help redress the simplistic coupling of music and wellbeing lauded by music education advocacy. Drawing upon feminist vulnerability studies, I then reflect upon the distinctive experiences of inherent, situational, and pathogenic musical vulnerabilities in the classroom, and their relation to institutional, interpersonal, and individual responses to music’s particular semantic and somatic properties. I conclude by proposing how the conceptualization of musical vulnerability could transform music education through cultivating a renewed ethic of care. (shrink)

Understanding the form and content of the Bible's hymns allows the sermon to share their principal characteristic: praise to the honor and glory of God.

A functioning democracy depends on the free flow of information in the marketplace of ideas, creating an informed citizenry that can engage in public debate.This study examines the most-used online news portal, Yahoo!, to determine if the news media industry can be simultaneously profitable and socially responsible, providing the public with news that is both informative and engaging in an increasingly global world.

Reading Certainty offers incisive historical analysis of the foundational questions of the Christian tradition: how are we to read scripture, and how can we know we are saved? This collection of essays honors the work and thought Susan E. Schreiner by exploring the import of these questions across a wide range of time periods. With contributions from renowned scholars and from Schreiner's students from her more than three decades of teaching, each of the contributions highlights the nexus of certainty, perception, (...) authority, and exegesis that has defined her scholarly work. Intellectual historians, early modernists, and scholars of Christianity will all appreciate this testament to Schreiner's influence. Contributors include: Vincent Evener, Bruce Gordon, Ralph Keen, Mark Lambert, Kevin J. Madigan, Richard A. Muller, Willemien Otten, Daniel Owings, Elizabeth Palmer, Karen Park, Barbara Pitkin, Ronald K. Rittgers, William Schweiker, Jonathan Strom, and Matthew Vanderpoel. (shrink)

Showing respect is a key value in society today. Readers will learn about its cultural origins, how it applies to rules and laws in our society today, and how democratic societies rely on it to function properly.

Contents include a selected bibliography and an editor's Introduction broken into two sections. The first section provides a brief sketch of the historical, social, and biographical context in which Mill wrote and the second traces the central line of argument in the text to aid in the comprehension of the essay's structure, method, and major theses.

Despite tremendous investment to promote gender equity, U.S. public accounting firms continue to be gendered organizations. Our archival study examines gender equity within the partnership of these large firms for a one-year period. We find female partners are clustered in lower prestige client types including investment funds, benefit plans, and single audits, rather than higher prestige public company clients. Second, we consider whether there is gender bias in prestige of client served by female partners who lead public company audits. In (...) these tests of those individuals who have already achieved the partnership and lead public company audits, we find no evidence of bias. This research contributes to the understanding of gender bias in U.S. public accounting firms and helps inform the societal narrative on where women continue to be marginalized even when they have achieved the highest levels in an organization. (shrink)

This work exposes the practices that are controlling education and reducing it to little more than skills development in preparation for work. It questions the strategy of mentoring to show how its dynamic requires docility from the learner and thus perpetuates inequality.

This paper develops a Kantian account of the moral assessment of institutions. The problem I address is this: while a deontological theory may find that some legal institutions are required by justice, it is not obvious how such a theory can assess institutions not strictly required (or prohibited) by justice. As a starting-point, I consider intuitions that in some cases it is desirable to attribute non-consequentialist moral value to institutions not required by justice. I will argue that neither consequentialist nor (...) virtue-ethical accounts account for these intuitions, suggesting that a distinctive deontological account is needed. The account I give is drawn from Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals; I distinguish it from Kantian views of institutions developed by Barbara Herman and Onora O’Neill. Throughout, I use marriage as an example. (shrink)

In this paper I examine three historically significant readings of the epochal transition from the Middle Ages to the modern world: that provided by Alexandre Koyré in From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe , that of Hans Blumenberg in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age and that of Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition . Each of these readings isolates crucial aspects of the epochal transition which contribute to an understanding of the loss or transformation of traditional measures (...) for knowing and doing consequent upon the shift from the contemplative to the active life. Blumenberg provides a philosophical explanation for the cosmological shift which Koyré describes, while Arendt thematizes the dangers inherent in the loss of an ethical measure which accompanies this transition. Yet both Blumenberg and Arendt conclude that the search for a world-immanent epistemological measure, which would allow us to gauge the adequacy of our descriptions of the world, is not simply a problem for the modern philosopher to address, but rather an impossibility already abandoned in the transition to the modern age. I argue that, on the contrary, such a measure is a requisite of the modern scientific enterprise. (shrink)

This collaborative companion piece, written as a postscript to the three preceding essays, highlights four themes in comparative religious ethics that emerge through our focus on sex and gender: language, embodiment, justice, and critique.

This brief text assists students in understanding Hume's philosophy and thinking so that they can more fully engage in useful, intelligent class dialogue and improve their understanding of course content. Part of the "Wadsworth Philosophers Series,", ON HUME is written by a philosopher deeply versed in the philosophy of this key thinker. Like other books in the series, this concise book offers sufficient insight into the thinking of a notable philosopher better enabling students to engage in the reading and to (...) discuss the material in class and on paper. (shrink)

Although a second-person neuroscience has high ecological validity, the extent to which a second- versus third-person neuroscience approach fundamentally alters neural patterns of activation requires more careful investigation. Nonetheless, we are hopeful that this new avenue will prove fruitful in significantly advancing our understanding of typical and atypical social cognition.

This paper discusses Jacques Derrida's Death Penalty Seminars (two consecutive seminars he gave at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in 1999–2000 and 2000–2001), as well as his 2000 Paris address to the States General of Psychoanalysis entitled “Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul.” The paper is magnetized by two questions: what does it mean to say, as Derrida says in his provocative statement at the end of his 1999 seminar, “even when the death penalty will have (...) been abolished . . . it will survive, there will still be some death penalty [même quand la peine de mort sera abolie . . . elle survivra, il y en aura encore]”? And why is psychoanalysis in a privileged position to address “this irreducible thing in the life of the animate being” that is the possibility of cruelty? (shrink)